(t2) Bay Area Oakland Web Design, Photography, Tech Support

Do you have photos all over the place? On external hard drives? Different photos on different computers? Some are on iPhoto, and some are in Lightroom?

Get rid of the mess. We have been recommending Lightroom for months because it is far superior to any other photo management program. Although it may take a little time, this is absolutely the best way to manage photos on your computer. Tag them.

One of the many ways Lightroom is useful is how it stores and saves your data in an intelligent way. When you “import” your photos, you can choose to “import from the source”. This way, if you have an external hard drive with all your photos, you are not creating duplicate copies of anything.

Lightroom’s weekly back-up reminder may seem annoying at first, but it is actually very useful. It is not backing up your photos — it is just backing up the thumbnails, settings, rotations, keywords, and other database information to a local file. (22,000 photos is about 240 megs of data, for reference.)

ENLARGE
Here you’ll see the Library Loupe View, with two sidebars on the left and right.

Quick ways to tag photos:

1. Select the photo in any view and type Command-K (or Control-K on a PC). This selects the keyword box. You can just fill in a few letters of a tag and press Tab to complete the word, type a comma, and type the next tag. When you’re finished, press Enter.

ENLARGE

2. Create keyword shortcuts. Command-Shift-K to open a dialog, and type in tags that you will frequently be using. If you know the next 50 photos will use “beach” and “ocean”, type those in, and to enter those tags in on the photos, simply press K. It will add to your keywords, not overwrite them. Command-Z to undo.

3. Tag multiple photos at once. Select a bunch of photos by holding Command and Clicking individual photos, or select a series of photos by using the Shift-Click. Once they are highlighted, press Command-K to move to the keywords (or tags) dialogue box, type in your tags and press Enter.

4. Use the “Keyword Sets / Recent Keywords” box. Use the dialogue box just beneath the Keywords box for quick access to your most recent tags. Just click them, and they the keyword will automatically insert into the Keyword diagloue.

ENLARGE

Search for your photos.

Now that you have tagged your photos, you can quickly search through them by using the Search dialogue on the left.

No more digging through iPhoto “rolls”, looking through file folders, or guessing which month you took a photo. Tag them and let Lightroom’s powerful file manager take care of the work for you.

Tip: While you’re tagging your photos, you can quickly rate them by pressing the ] and [ keys (left and right brackets). When you’re finished, search and filter for your top rated photos and export them with Lightroom’s awesome web gallery app.

T2 Photography in Yunnan, China :: Panoramic shot of Lugu Lake

Published

The T2 Team

on September 16, 2007

in photography

. 3 Comments

This beautiful panoramic shot of Lugu Hu was taken in Sichuan, China. From Yunnan’s capital city of Kunming, it is about a 12-hour drive to get to Lugu Lake.

This was shot on a Canon DSLR, taking six shots (metering for the sky in manual focus, no tripod) and was ~~stitched~~ merged together with Photoshop CS3’s amazing photomerge utility. The only modification to the photo was level correction.

Ask T2 for Free Technical Support

Published

The T2 Team

on September 16, 2007

in Tech Tips

. 9 Comments

We are now taking questions to help those in need of technical support. Just post your question in the comments or send us an email. We will post the solutions here at T2 Tech and Photo.

It’s that simple! Have friends or family members who are struggling with something? Help us spread the word to those who need a little help!

Details: We cannot answer technical support questions over the phone, so please post or email your questions. We will try to provide thorough, step-by-step solutions, but if you stump us, please be kind! For more information refer to our T2 privacy policy.

Garbled or Corrupt Fonts on Mac OSX? FontNuke Doesn’t Work?

Published

The T2 Team

on September 14, 2007

in Apple and Tech Tips

. 2 Comments

T2 Bay Area Web Design Oakland San Francisco - Help with Garbled Fonts on Mac OSX

Problem: I just installed some fonts on my Mac (OS X) and now when I load Google, the “Loading…” is gibberish, garbled, corrupted text. Safari is rendering text differently, with different font familes, and some random text is garbled as well. I Googled around, saw that people recommend FontNuke, but that didn’t solve the problem. What do I do?

Answer: The fonts on the Mac are a bit sensitive. Did you know that if you remove the Lucida Grande font, the entire OS will not load? As a general rule, never remove any system fonts. So your fonts are corrupt — here is what you need to do to get your computer back to normal.

Validate your fonts. Load Font Book (Applications > Font Book) and select all your fonts (Command-A), and then choose File > Validate Fonts. Remove any fonts that are tagged with errors or warnings.
Clear your font cache. Download and install FontNuke and follow the instructions.
Move your User fonts to a temporary directory. Go to your user/Library/Fonts (i.e., johnny/Library/Fonts — where user equals your account on your Mac — make sure you do not move the fonts from the the System/Library/Fonts folder) and move those files to a temporary folder on your desktop. Again, do not delete them, just move all of them. Make sure there are no files in the user/Library/Fonts directory. Reboot.
Move the fonts that came with your system back to that directory. After the reboot, your system should look fine. Test it. Now that everything is back to normal, you still have that directory on your desktop full of your user-installed fonts. Move the fonts that are in the temporary desktop folder back to the user/Library/Fonts folder one by one to see which font is causing the problem. Move the most important fonts first.
Still not working? Read the article at the end of this post (it’s lengthy, but should help you). The last thing you want to do is reinstall your OS.

After everything is working again, think twice about installing fonts. Make sure you buy fonts from a reputable source and always check to see if they are compatible with your OS. Avoid using free fonts — besides that fact that they usually look bad, there is a high probability that they will cause errors.

Further reading:
Apple Discussion Board Thread

Mac Tip: Instant Dictionary

Published

The T2 Team

on June 5, 2007

in Apple, OS and Tech Tips

. 0 Comments

No need to open up the dictionary to get a definition of a word. Now, in all system and Cocoa apps you have instant access to the system’s dictionary.

1. Click on the word once.
2. While hovering over the word with your mouse, hold down Apple-Control-D.
3. Viola.

How to Install SQL Database Server on a Mac (for Beginners / Newbies)

Published

The T2 Team

on June 5, 2007

in Mac and SQL

. 2 Comments

Tech Support San Francisco New to learning SQL? Have some good books and you are ready to dive in? Only one problem, the directions in those books are usually written with instructions for Windows. Here is the complete step-by-step guide to installing SQL Database Server on your Mac (OS X 10.4+), all the way up to creating your first database.

How to Install MySQL Database Server for OSX

Go to http://dev.mysql.com and download the latest MySQL Database Server. (At this writing, the latest version is 5.0.41, so all file names below reflect this version.)
Once downloaded, double-click mysql-5.0.41-osx10.4-i686.dmg to mount the disk image.
In the disk image, click mysql-5.0.41-osx10.4.i686.pkg to install the program.
The installation dialog is simply, click OK to finish everything up. If you need detailed help with the installation, click here.

Accessing MySQL on a Mac

To use MySQL, everything is done in the Terminal, under Applications > Utilities > Terminal.
Once Terminal is loaded, create an alias for MySQL. Type:
alias mysql=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql
You will need to login as the root user to create another account. Type:
mysql -u root -p
For the password, hit Enter
Now you should be at the mysql> prompt.
Type: grant all privileges on *.* to 'you‘@’localhost’ identified by ‘password‘;
Where you is a name you pick, and password is a password you pick.
Type quit to exit.
To launch SQL from the shell with the you user (and not the root user), type:
mysql -u you -p

And enter the password you chose earlier.
Create a database at the mysql> by typing:
create database nameofmydb

Where nameofmydb is a name you pick for your database.

Here is a list of MySQL commands.

We hope this helps with your very first steps into the world of SQL and databases on the Mac!

Clear Favicon Cache in Safari

Published

The T2 Team

on June 3, 2007

in Mac, Safari and Tech Tips

. 3 Comments

Favicons, those lovely little icons next to the web address in your browser.

Bay Area Web Design

Have you recently made a cool favicon in Photoshop and exported it out to that tiny 16×16 pixel file? Then you uploaded it to the server, previewed it in Safari, everything works great, right?

Until you modified it, uploaded it again to the server, and it did not update in Safari. Since you are here, you probably found that clearing the cache in Safari doesn’t seem to work. Here is the workaround.

To Clear Your Favicon Cache in Safari:

Open Terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal)
Type: cd ~/Library/Safari/icons
Type: find . -type f -print | xargs grep "yourSite.com" (where “yourSite.com” is the site you are trying to update).
A list will appear, with probably 3 or four files, looking something this:

Binary file ./13/15/1455101138-2004414134.cache matches Binary file ./13/15/1455101138-3102305223.cache matches Binary file ./13/15/1455101138-2002130231.cache matches

You need to delete these cache files (no harm to your computer at all).
Highlight and copy (Apple-C) the line of code that looks like this:
Example: ./13/15/1455101138-2008441434.cache
Type: rm and then press Apple-V to paste the file name, so it looks like this:
Example: rm ./13/15/1455101138-2008441434.cache
Hit Enter
Repeat with the next files

Now your Safari Favicon cache is deleted, and assuming you have already replaced your favicon.ico file with your new on on the server, your new favicon will show up next time you visit the page.

This “How To” is a quick fix, because you probably won’t be changing your favicon icon often. However, if you would like learn more please visit Ask Dave Taylor.)

Google Maps & Street view - Doesn’t Work! (Not in the USA?) Answer here.

Published

The T2 Team

on May 30, 2007

in Google

. 1 Comment

You have probably heard about Street View, the new Google Map feature that allows you to “drive” down a street and lets you view a high-resolution 360º panoramic image of the street.

If it is not working for you (or, you are not seeing the “little person icon”), then chances are you are probably outside of the United States.

Here is the fix:

Add &gl=us at the end of the URl and it should work, for example:

Original URl: http://maps.google.com/map…19&om=1
Fixed URl: http://maps.google.com/map…19&om=1&gl=us

Feature Overview

Bay Area Tech Support

1. Notice that direction of the green arrow is pointing in the corresponding direction in the image preview.
2. The blue double line is the path that Google has recorded, or taken photos of already.
3. There is a smart compass inside the image for more clarity.
4. Zoom, turn left or right, or in a 360º circle, with the navigation buttons.
5. Full screen mode.

Search

Latest

RSS

Blogroll

Search

Latest

Blogroll